KIEP Opinions

Rising protectionism has recently become an increasing concern amongst a number of trade economists and policymakers. Although many developing countries as well as developed countries have reduced their tariffs under the WTO and through many other regional trade agreements, we are still seeing and worrying about the current rise of protectionism. Today if we focus only on tariffs when talking about protectionism, many issues are apt to be overlooked. This is because there is a trend of more countries substituting tariffs with NTMs. It is not easy to compare NTMs with tariffs and reducing NTMs is much more difficult in the short term because NTMs are primarily attached to regulations and their impacts are hard to quantify. In order to reduce the opacity and address the heterogeneity issues of NTMs, international cooperation on NTMs will be essential and a rulesbased multilateral trading system needs to be restored. As Korea is one of the major beneficiaries of the multilateral trading system, it is imperative for the Korean economy to keep the momentum of trade liberalization. Persistent efforts are called for in identifying, monitoring and removing NTMs at the national level as well as in the regional and global community.